Any source on this? Sounds interesting. There's only so many reasonable places you could put an antenna, given that vehicles are mostly metallic. So, if so many cars are have cell modems, they should be easy to find.
I'm aware of OnStar, but that certainly doesn't cover "most" cars. GM has less than 20% of the US market [0].
I have an engineer friend who works on the 2/3G modems for a German automotive brand. He told me anecdotally many years ago. And the public generally learned from the security breaches and vulnerability exposures. Here is one:
As you can see in the article above, by "most" I meant pretty much everybody. Just like gorilla glass are standard for smartphones, car connectivity is a standard feature on modern cars, and it doesn't cost much to the manufacturers to add that on - given the upstream auto suppliers producing these TCUs (telematics control unit) in a massive scale, which is also why all these car brands were affected (sourced from the same supplier.) And they can up-sell connectivity based subscription features with higher profit margin.
It's usually a wholesale deal like what those MVNO are getting for the initial period of a new car and then car owners pay for the full service price later. The Big three wireless carriers want those IoT contacts as much as the automotive manufacturers, since those are also counted as subscribers and generating recurring revenues.
Any source on this? Sounds interesting. There's only so many reasonable places you could put an antenna, given that vehicles are mostly metallic. So, if so many cars are have cell modems, they should be easy to find.
I'm aware of OnStar, but that certainly doesn't cover "most" cars. GM has less than 20% of the US market [0].
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/239607/vehicle-sales-mar...